Progressives and democrats everywhere are reeling from the results of last month’s election in Chile. Up and down the narrow Andean country and far beyond, many are holding their breath in anticipation of Sunday’s runoff election results. After the first-place finish by the hard-right José Antoni Kast, many are wondering how a pro-Pinochet reactionary could beat out the new left in a society that just two years earlier exploded in a rebellion against decades of neoliberalism.

The country in which 80 percent of voters recently chose to rewrite the constitution just saw Kast, an apologist for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship who repudiated the demands of the upheaval and campaigned against the Constituent Assembly, surpass the candidate who embodies comprehensive reforms and the fight for a new social democratic charter. Fears of a return to fascism have overtaken the hopes spawned by the rebellion and the constituent process. Has Chile flipped from an October of anti-neoliberal insurgency to a November of authoritarian pro-market continuity?

Coming on the heels of a decade-long cycle of mass protest against neoliberalism, the turnaround has stunned observers and activists. To make sense of Kast’s first-round victory, the Left must reckon with a spate of blunders that turned key fractions of the electorate in favor of reactionary solutions to the ravages of neoliberalism. A clear grasp of Chile’s abrupt reversal from mass mobilization and social democratic refoundation to reactionary counterreform also sheds light on the wider Latin American phenomenon of surging revanchism.